This is a picture I did not take
of anything
I've ever seen. It's time for a few submissions from Unphotographable readers:
"I've been photographing jazz musicians for years. Once I went to an Art Pepper concert in Rome, where I lived at the time. I'd never heard him live and brought my cameras with me, wanting to add photos of him to my growing collection. But I'm one of those people who can't walk and chew gum at the same time: if I'm concentrating on "seeing" - using a camera - I can't really hear/absorb the music.
Well, the man played his soul that night. He played his life. And I put my cameras away and just listened. Didn't take a shot but came away from that concert totally blown away and grateful to have been there. Never got another chance to photograph Art Pepper as he died several months later."
-
Nina Contini Melis
"This is my un-shot still-life of a small unexpected basket of complimentary fruit sitting on top of a low Ikea-esque chest of drawers consonant with the decor of this large hotel room in the Hotel Medium, Bratislava. It is a small light coloured straw basket consisting of six pieces of fruit; four apples on bottom balancing a large orange on top centre, with an adjacent banana balanced on the front two apples, giving the immediate impression of a clay-mation psyclops smiling when viewed from above."
- Vernon Reid
"It was my first trip to the area in Mississippi that took the brunt of Hurricane Katrina's wrath, the twin cities of Bay St. Louis and Waveland. This was my first "tour of duty" in a regular rotation of reporter and photographer teams that MSNBC.com is sending down for an entire year as we chronicle the recovery of these two neighboring towns. I'd seen all the destruction via TV coverage, of course. I'd even seen the endless stream of photography from the wires. But nothing... nothing could compare to being "boots on the ground" there. There were so many picture opportunities--and this was nearly two months AFTER Katrina hit--that my photographer's sensibility was in overload. But I couldn't even lift my camera to my eye to take any pictures. "How can I even begin to tell this story in pictures?" I thought to myself. The scope of the destruction, literally everywhere I looked, was too broad, too deep, too emotional.
I spent a week there and took no pictures; it was only on my second tour that was I finally able to get my head around the place and start making some pictures."
- Brock N. Meeks, chief washington correspondent, MSNBC.com